Sweet Forty-Two(74)

Ember squeezed my knee. “You’re rambling. Slow down. First of all, you are a real person capable of a real relationship. Second of all, I don’t think any of us will ever be done healing from Rae’s death ... she’ll kind of flow through our lives like that gooey stuff in a lava lamp, filling in empty spaces, but never creating more emptiness. But I want those little holes, you know? For her to fill. And last of all, it definitely sounds like you need to find a way to tell Rae you love her.”

“Loved ... right? Loved?”

Ember shook her head. “No. You love her. I love her, Bo loves her, we all love her. She’s just not here.”

I nodded, swallowing the jagged edges of she’s not here one by one.

“So ... what will you do? Just for Rae, just between you and Rae, find your way to say goodbye to her that doesn’t involve a funeral, doesn’t involve hiding in Ireland for three months. Tell her you love her, Regan.” She leaned into my shoulder, her head tilting down and her hair falling down my arm.

I wrapped my arm around her. “You’re smart, you know that?”

“I had stuff I wasn’t able to say to her, too, you know...” Ember didn’t look at me, she kept looking forward.

“Like what?”

She sniffed, but made no move to wipe away the present tear. “Like that her brother and I finally got our heads out of our asses.” Ember chuckled a little at the tear-pinched end of her sentence.

I squeezed her into me as her shoulders shook. “So what’d you do?”

She sat up, finally wiping under her eyes. “Bo and I wrote her letters, then made a bonfire, and burned them, sending the spirit of the letter into the universe.”

I laughed. It was completely inappropriate and poor timing, but I laughed. Then Ember smacked me.

“Don’t be an *!” she shrieked playfully.

“I’m sorry. I just ... was that your parents’ idea?”

She laughed and pressed her forehead on my shoulder. “Yes!”

I kissed the top of her forehead. “Did it work?”

She nodded. “We felt a lot better after it.”

I bit another smile away. “Is it okay with you if I ... don’t do that?”

“I hate you,” she growled into my shoulder.

“I know.”

She sat up, cheeks rosy from laughter and tears. “Do something, though. I don’t care how looney it might seem to me or Bo or anyone else. Do something.”

“First,” I yawned as I stood, “I’m gonna go home and go to bed.”

Once I was at the door, Ember tugged on the back of my shirt.

“Regan?”

“Yeah?” I turned around to find her smiling softly, mostly with her eyes.

“I like what Georgia’s done to your face.”

I pulled my eyebrows together and Ember reached for my cheeks.

“The smiles. The reddish color that rivals your hair. If she does that to you, then she’s okay by me. You don’t need my opinion, and you didn’t ask ... but I want you to know that I see the life in your face again. And I’ll kiss her for it someday.”

I grabbed Ember into a tight hug. “I love you, Em.”

“I love you, too. Now ... go tell Rae the same thing, okay?”

“How?” I asked as I backed away.

She shrugged. “You laughed at my idea,” she teased. “Seriously, though ... you’ll figure it out.”

The truth was, I thought as I drove away, I knew exactly what I had to do.





Regan

So, over the next couple of weeks, I started. I started working on my final love letter to Rae. In between recording with The Six, which was only going to last another few weeks, and helping Georgia with the bakery, I worked on my goodbye.

It wasn’t ready yet, and I hadn’t really thought through what I was actually going to do with it when I was done, but the working on it was enough for now.

In the post-kiss atmosphere of Georgia’s still unnamed bakery, I was thankful for her gritty ability to compartmentalize her life. There were no awkward pauses in conversation or bizarre back and forth dances trying to pass by each other as we moved around the kitchen. We seemed to only be seeing each other in the bakery these days, and that was a lack of sleep well worth it.

We were both exhausted from the hours we’d kept over the last two weeks since I started helping her, but according to Georgia, it was working. She’d had business cards made, with just her information on it, since the bakery had no name—a fact I mentioned to her whenever I could—and she would deliver her baked goods to local businesses and set up stands at various farmers’ markets, too. Her phone had been buzzing like crazy with people telling her the things they liked best, placing large orders for private parties, and asking, of course, when she’d be open for business.

“I just need to get people in here on a regular basis, now.” She spoke in the middle of a train of thought I wasn’t riding. She caught on to my confusion. “Sorry ... I was thinking it’s one thing to have people know where you are, but you need to get people into the habit of coming to your place, to put it on the maps in their brains and make it part of their daily or weekly routine. Sure, they can place orders and pick them up, but I want people, like, here, too.”